by John McPhee
Fraser’s mother-in-law, before she became that, used to send newspaper clippings about him and his plantation to her daughter wherever she might be—at Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, for example, or, later, in Washington, D.C., where she worked for Senator Thurmond. “Mary’s mother is a very sensible Southern mother, who knows that her daughter’s standard of living depends on her husband’s income,” Fraser once explained. “Mary was accustomed to a very elegant standard. She had a Cadillac to drive to school when she was sixteen—and that was just the leftover car around the place.” Mary, in her college days, had not so much as met him. He was twelve years older than she, and he lived two hundred miles from Greenville, her home town. Nonetheless, she dutifully read and saved the clippings. Eventually, she would more or less save Fraser. Small details not being his forte, she had assumed responsibility for looking after them. He forgot everything —his money, his briefcase, his topcoat, his whereabouts. He lost every hat he ever owned. “Hats are a nuisance and an absurdity,” he complained. He was not absentminded, his wife decided. He was simply not interested in petty detail. He read all the time. He read walking upstairs, he read until his food was cold, and he rigged up extra lights in the car so he could read while she drove. He forgot his raincoat but remembered facts. Three minutes after he walked into a room, it was a shambles. “Have you read this? What did you think of it? What do you think about that?” Newspapers hit the floor. Sixteen books came off the shelves. “Charles says there is so little time, and never a convenient time for anything, so if you want to do something you have to just do it,” Mary once said. “He applies this to a trip to Europe, to conceiving a child—to anything.” Mary, dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender, was collaterally descended from a family named Lawton that once grew cotton on Hilton Head Island—in fact, on the site of Sea Pines Plantation. When Fraser’s archival researches yielded this fragment, he was most pleased. He and Mary began to refer to it as “the heritage.” He would talk about it with a detached grin, but he was obviously happy that he had something like that to be detached about. “The Lawtons were planters,” he liked to say, invoking images of antebellum wealth and antebellum elegance. He once introduced his four-year-old daughter, Laura Lawton, to a stranger.
“Hello, Laura,” said the stranger.
“It will have to be Laura Lawton, I’m afraid,” said Fraser. “Laura Lawton, say ‘My great-great-great-great-great-granddaddy planted cotton here.’”
In an office at the University of California Press, in 1941, Anne Hus had demonstrated to David Brower that she could lean over and pick a newspaper off the floor with her teeth. She wondered if he could do the same. They shared the office. Both were editors, working on what she called “rewarmed dissertations with the scaffolding taken out.” He said stiffly, about the newspaper stunt, that one does not do that sort of thing in an office, and he refused to try. Brower as an editor made her jealous. “He was so much better than I. I have never understood where he got his feel for words. He is a great editor. He liberates what is good in an author’s work. It just infuriates me that anyone who has read so little can do that. I have been reading since I was four. He has never read anything. He hasn’t read novels. He knows very little about English literature. Yet he has a remarkable sense of language.” Anne had been born in Oakland. Her father was a man who failed at so many jobs that he said he should go into undertaking in order to prolong human life. Her grandfather John P. Irish, editor and politician, was the man who was debating with William Jennings Bryan when Bryan said, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Brower was in the 10th Mountain Division when, in 1943, he proposed to Anne by mail. Before he went overseas, they lived in Colorado for a time, and then in West Virginia, where Brower taught climbing to the mountain troops, on the Seneca Rocks. He spent so much time on bivouac that she despaired and went to Washington, where she edited combat narratives for Army Intelligence. Later, she went back to the University of California. She was still an editor there when I met her, in 1969. A gentle person, she seemed almost complacent—an impression that belied her sharpness of ear and eye. I remembered her telling him once, “I never see people I’d rather be married to than you —especially in National Parks.” Brower obviously needed her guidance. Away from her, he could scarcely pass a phone booth without getting into it and calling her. At the Press, in their early days, he had dropped from sight now and again and gone off to the Sierra Nevada. After he had been doing this for a while, she told him he was getting away with murder. Leaning over, he picked a newspaper off the floor with his teeth and said he had to practice somewhere. He asked her to go with him to the mountains. She loved the sea and didn’t like the mountains. “Edna Ferber said mountains were beautiful but dumb, and that is how I felt, too. Finally, I went on a Sierra Club trip just to fill in. To get through it, I took a bottle, and took nips. After three days, I really loved the trip—such incredible country. Until you’ve seen him up there, you don’t know him.”
I thought of Brower in the Sierra Nevada, in the Valley of the Mineral King. To conservationists, the Mineral King had become an Agincourt, a Saratoga, an El Alamein. Walt Disney Productions wanted to string the slopes with lifts and build enough hotels there to draw a million people a year. Mineral King had been mentioned as an excellent setting for the Winter Olympics of 1976, celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation. Brower and I went to Mineral King together. My impression was that—all other considerations aside—it was an extraordinarily good site for a skiing resort. A stream ran through the middle of the valley, and if you stood beside it and looked up and around you saw eleven conical peaks, the points of a granite coronet. The steep slopes of these mountains were covered with red fir, juniper, aspen, and foxtail pine. Great rising swaths were treeless and meadowed. Hannes Schneider had called it the best potential ski area in California. So much snow had been there the winter before that avalanches had sheared off many hundreds of trees twenty feet above the ground—the snow was that deep. The avalanches had been so powerful that they had not stopped at the bottom of the valley but had climbed the other side, smashing trees. In the geological history of the Sierra Nevada, Mineral King was an old valley. The Sierra Nevada had been a minor mountain range of about four thousand feet when it began the great upheaval that made it higher than the Rockies. New streams cut through the new uplift and created valleys like the Yosemite, with wide, flat floors and sheer walls. The Mineral King was lifted with the mountains and remained intact, a V-shaped valley—alpine, ancestral—and it caught snow like nothing else in a mountain range that was named for the snow that fell there. Brower had done a ski survey of Mineral King once, long ago, and had said that he favored limited development. He said now that he essentially felt the same way. Sitting under a big cottonwood with his feet in the stream, he pointed out that the valley was, for one thing, not wilderness. A road reached into it. A couple of dozen buildings were there, a sawmill, and corrals belonging to a pack station. Listening to him, a surprised conservationist might have thought that the Antichrist had come to the Mineral King disguised as David Brower. But to the Disney interests Brower would not have seemed like much of an advocate. Looking around at the Mineral King peaks, he decided that although he was for limited development, he was against ski lifts. He said he preferred to see people earn their ski runs by climbing with skins attached to their skis. Moreover, he was against improvement of the existing access road, an incredibly twisting cliff-hanger so narrow and serpentine that a million people trying to use it would grow old before they reached the valley. Brower said Disney Productions should build a hundred-million-dollar tunnel, or fly people in—save the approaching mountains, hang the cost. Told he was being almost poetically impractical, Brower responded that the Disney people were going to change something forever, so they could amortize the changes over a thousand years.
Fraser rolled over and sighed in his sleep. I wondered if in the day to follow he would find that Brower’
s apparent tolerance for the development of Cumberland Island was equally tied in string. He sighed again. Possibly he was dreaming of Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik Aktiengesellschaft, a name, of all names, that haunted him. Fraser was hoist on a most ironic petard. Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik Aktiengesellschaft, known as BASF, was a company that made, among other things, petrochemicals and dyes for the textile and furniture industries, and not long before they had decided to expand beyond Ludwigshafen and into the American South. They searched in several states for a site for a new plant. There were plenty of possibilities. What in the end attracted the Germans most in all the South was Sea Pines Plantation. German chemical kings apparently liked golf and the good life, too. They had found a plant site on Victoria Bluff, three miles from Hilton Head Island. Air and water pollution would surely follow. Fraser, meanwhile, had become the unlikely leader of a battalion of druids, whose war cry was “BASF—Bad Air, Sick Fish!” Ultimately, Fraser and his druids would drive the Germans away, but he had learned that even in the beauty of Sea Pines Plantation there could be something fatal.
One night of camping out, even in a fifteen-hundred-dollar mobile tent, was quite enough for Fraser, and the following evening we transferred our gear to a motorship called the Intrepid, which had slipped quietly down the coast from Hilton Head and into the Cumberland River. The size of Fraser’s yacht was proportionate to his distaste for wilderness. The yacht was ninety feet long. It contained five staterooms and a floor-through saloon. Its bar was stocked with Tanqueray gin. Fraser’s Southern antennae had reached out unobtrusively, suprasocially, and their research had shown that Tanqueray is Brower’s gin of gins. With the moral support of a friendly doctor, Brower once used gin as his principal weapon in humbling a stomach ulcer, and he was so successful that he has ever since been a friend of the preventive Martini. With something beatific in his eyes, he ritually asks for “a Martini with Tanqueray gin, straight up, with nothing in it.” Lemon, he feels, changes the taste, while only a madman would accept an olive, for an olive displaces two cubic centimetres of gin. It had been a long, full day on the island, and Brower now settled back with a drink innocent of additives and watched the sun fall behind the Georgia mainland. Fraser sipped bourbon and Calvinistically worked on his stock prospectus—for several hundred thousand shares of something he was calling Recreational Environments, Inc., at twenty-five dollars a share. He needed money for expansion—not only to Cumberland Island but to half a dozen other places he was interested in, from North Carolina to Hawaii. He had just bought six miles of beautiful and undeveloped white beach under coconut palms on the east coast of Puerto Rico, and only the week before he had gone as far as Kuwait looking for funds. “I’m just an oyster catcher from South Carolina begging for money,” he said, moving a blue pencil over the prospectus. “A million dollars. A million dollars. Can you spare a million dollars?”
“Look at that sun on that smog!” Brower said. Shining low through the air over the paper-mill country, the sun tended to embarrass Georgia. It appeared to be setting in black-bean gumbo. “American industry never asked my permission to shorten my life,” Brower went on. “They have taken two years off my life and will take seven years off my children’s. These are figures I can’t support, but I believe them.”
“Let’s put a paper mill over here on Cumberland Island and get the smell away from the cities,” Fraser said, looking at Sam Candler, who went on looking at the sunset.
“Whatever their economy is, they haven’t paid for the people’s air,” Brower said. “They should be given six months to clean up or go out of business. Roll, you earth. I swear the sunset is slower than the sunrise.”
On the beach at six-fifty-seven that morning, we had watched the sun jump into the clear sea air like a rubber ball released from a hand below the ocean’s surface. Fraser, over breakfast, read an article called “The Dying Marsh” in Audubon magazine, and throughout the day he pelted Brower with sachets and nosegays. Hurtling along a narrow, curving sand road through the forest, Fraser said, “We’ll call this the David Brower Scenic Drive.” And later, approaching an attractive swamp, he said, “We’ll call this the David Brower Wildlife Sanctuary and Woodland Recreation Area.” In a small skiff on a tidal creek, Fraser stood in the bow like George Washington and spoke what were apparently the first words of a press release he was forming in his mind: “Charles Fraser announced today the results of a detailed study for the use of Cumberland Island.” Sam Candler had one hand on the skiff’s tiller and with the other he was bailing. Flights of ducks passed overhead. The tide was low. Using a small anchor as a kind of oyster rake, Fraser knocked hundreds of oysters loose from an exposed bed. He was clearly feeling very good. On the beach, he drove at fifty-five miles an hour and said gleefully that he had decided to name his new development the Cumberland Island Conservation Association.
Brower was feeling good, too—obviously enjoying himself on the island. Why he did not rise up and clout Fraser, verbally, seemed a little odd to me, but I had seen him before in situations where he was getting the sense and feel of something, and while his mind was working toward a settled attitude he had vacillated or lapsed into an uncharacteristic passivity. In the North Cascades, he had known where he was. He had been there before, and had fought for the wilderness there. He had never before set foot on Cumberland Island. Fraser, ebullient, was finding Brower so docile that he wouldn’t even call him a druid, and in a sense Fraser was right, for the rote behavior of an ordinary member of the priesthood should be simple to predict. This, however, was—as Fraser apparently did not grasp—no ordinary member of the priesthood. This was the inscrutable lord of the forest, the sacramentarian of ecologia americana, the Archdruid himself. Fraser’s difficulties with druids were anything but over.
Lacking a target in the invisible Brower, Fraser eventually attacked Candler. Candler, whose original intention had been merely to help show Brower around the island, had tried to hold off from saying much, but now there was a gun-fusillade argument.
“Sam, you just don’t want people on this beach, do you?” Fraser said.
“I didn’t say that,” Candler said.
“A man has no more right to personal private property on a beach than he has to a highway, an Army camp, a railroad, a school, a hospital, an airport, a valley to be flooded for a dam. A fundamental part of the pursuit of happiness is one’s annual vacation. Hence this beach is for a public purpose.”
“Your purpose. I’m happy to have people use the island now, if they make the effort to get over here and to enjoy it.”
We happened to be at the southern boundary of Fraser’s proposed development. Fraser said that a National Seashore should begin just there and extend all the way to the southern tip of the island—about fifteen miles—and that the north end, above his property, should become “an environmental-protection zone.” The development, he promised, would include nothing that would pollute the environment.
“What would it have?” Candler asked.
“Houses, a marina, an airport, a store.”
“That is not my idea of conservation.”
“Tell me, Sam, which Carnegies will break ranks and sell out next?”
No answer.
“How many Carnegies will rub their hands with glee when prices go up because of development?”
No answer.
“Those snobs—high on the list of the hundred most selfish families.”
“I’d like to make a list of island destroyers,” Candler said.
Fraser said, “The government has a perfect right to condemn my land here if it thinks its use is wiser than mine.”
It emerged that a Cumberland Island Conservation Association already existed.
“Name all organizations that exist on the island,” Fraser said.
“What do you mean?” Candler asked him.
“Every time I pick up a paper, I read about another organization.”
“You mean like your Cumberland Island Holding Company?”
“Name another one.”
“The Cumberland Island Conservation Association is the only one I know about,” Candler said.
“Is it incorporated?”
“I believe so.”
“You believe so?”
“Yes.”
“Who is the president of the Cumberland Island Conservation Association?”
“I am.”
“Is it incorporated?”
“I’m not real sure.”
“The light is nice on the water there,” Brower said. “The light is getting good.”